Scope and limits of Husserl's reactivation of the sedimented origins of the modern spirit

For Husserl, philosophy, as the universal science of what is, has but one goal: intuitive knowledge of what is. As we have seen, both what in the world the formalized meaning formations of mathematical physics refer to, and therefore make intuitable, and how in the world this reference and corresponding intuition is possible, are obscure on Husserl's view. He traces this obscurity to the fact that the formalized meaning in modern mathematics is made possible by the progressive “emptying of its meaning” (Crisis, 44/44) in relation to the “real” (Crisis, 35/37), that is, to the intuitive givenness of the things manifest to everyday sense experience in the surrounding world. Husserl's historical reflection on the beginnings of the development of modern, Galilean science reveals that it is first made possible by this progressive emptying of meaning. The meaning formations of the mathematics that make physics possible are themselves made possible by their “becoming liberated from all intuited actuality” (Crisis, 43/44), including the “magnitudes” (Crisis, 44/44) that “numbers are supposed to signify” and of course from the intuitively given shapes of actual things. More precisely, the ideal shapes of Euclidean geometry are substituted for the intuited shapes of things, while algebraic calculation with ““symbolic’ concepts” (Crisis, 48/48) that express numbers in general – as opposed to determinate numbers – excludes the “original thinking that genuinely gives meaning to this technical process and truth to the correct results” (Crisis, 46/46).